Rubber duck - lets me explain my issues.
AI makes you bold, you feel more confident in that you can tackle harder problems. It also gets you over tasks you dread, motivating you further.
Always commit before you let an AI agent loose on your codebase.
No auto code right in the editor: getting prompted without writing a prompt just produces garbage suggestions that are distracting.
Don't want it to degrade my skills so I should still write at least a third of my code manually, no copy paste. I need to be able to build without the AI and not overlook things.
Writing all test cases then have the AI do the implementation works but can cripple your productivity if the test case is wrong
Having AI generate tiny snippets is way less overwhelming then asking it to generate pages of code at once.
Research everything the AI produces that you don't understand.